The efficiency of the interface between user and computer is diminished by the need to move at least one hand back and forth from the computer keyboard to the mouse, track-ball, or thumb keypad to make cursor control operations occur. While the laptop cursor pad, keyboard track ball, or wrist rest track-bar, allows the operator's hands to remain near the keys during cursor movement, their thumb or finger operation still takes fingers away from being directly over the keyboard. Another shortcoming of pad operation is the random triggering of cursor activation, a very aggravating event. A standard mouse and laptop keypad operation has become routine, even methodical, while consuming otherwise productive time due to hand movements back and forth.
There have been numerous efforts to break the ingrained use of the standard mouse, and to place similar operations closer to the operator's hands when directly over the keyboard. Instrumented gloves, finger held gadgets, reflective rings, palmed electronics, headgear, earrings, track-bar, foot-peddles, eyes, virtual grids, and forehead spots are some of the items showing up in various reports and patents, primarily targeted at handicapped operators, and coming at a prohibitive cost for the general user.
In general practice, few if any of these attempts have come to the general user market. Their marketability may be hindered by the difficulty of their use, or very high costs. To be successful, a replacement of the current mouse should be easier to operate, and equally or less costly.
The current optical mouse (not the first mouse), developed by Agilent Technologies was introduced to the world in late 1999. Basically, moving an optical mouse over a flat surface allows the x and y mouse movements to be transferred to the cursor on the computer monitor. The optical mouse actually uses a tiny camera to take thousands of pictures every second as the unit is moved over a flat surface. It is able to work on almost any surface, but usually over a mouse pad. Most optical mice use a small, light-emitting diode (LED) that reflects light off a surface onto a complimentary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) sensor. In addition to LEDs, a recent innovation is a laser-based optical mouse that detects more surface details compared to LED technology. This results in the ability to use a laser-based optical mouse on even more surfaces than an LED mouse.
The sensor and other parts of an optical mouse work together:                The CMOS sensor sends each image to a digital signal processor (DSP) for analysis.        The DSP detects patterns in the images and examines how the patterns have moved since the previous image.        Based on the change in patterns over a sequence of images, the DSP determines how far the mouse has moved, and the direction, and sends the corresponding coordinates to the computer.        The computer moves the cursor on the screen based on the coordinates received from the DSP. This happens hundreds of times each second, making the cursor appear to move very smoothly.        
An optical mouse reads surface patterns at a microscopic level through a lens, at a resolution of 400 digits per inch (dpi), or higher at a rate of about 1,500 times per second, or even faster. A good optical sensor should read above 800 dpi and for high accuracy and speed, up to 50,000 dpi can be employed. A laser may be substituted for the LED. The use of a laser is based on the same idea except it uses a narrow beam of light that is reflected off the surface producing an image with greater contrast that is captured by a higher resolution sensor (i.e. 1600 dpi) at a higher rate, of up to 6000-7000 times per second, and possibly more. Because of this advancement, laser can track where optical cannot, such as on clear glass. Experts believe the laser mouse will take over the optical mouse the same way that the optical mouse wiped out the ball-resister type mouse.
What is needed is an improved substitute for the current cursor control.